This is the twenty-second weekly summary of the London Perl Mongers
mailing list. For the busy week starting 2001-06-18:
Don't forget the London.pm website for meetings etc. The next meeting
is an technical meeting on the 21st (yes, this thursday at state51),
and then a social meeting on Thursday 5th July:
http://london.pm.org/
It's finally happened: london.pm has switched to yet another mailing
this, this time hosted on the london.pm box. You should have been
transfered across already automagically and got a mail about
it. Please use [EMAIL PROTECTED] from now on to post to the list:
http://london.pm.org/mailman/listinfo/london.pm
Robert Thompson asked "what the pro's and con's are of using XML to
structure ASCII based data files". In summary, we kind of like XML for
transferring information or for storing long-lived content. We like
XML::XPath. We've all written our own pipe-delimited file formats /
CSV in the past, but they were quick hacks. Quick hacks are OK
sometimes. XML parsing may be slow. Some love and some hate
XSLT. AxKit is cool. DBD::CSV is cool. Use XML if you want to - it's a
good thing to have on your CV anyway...
Accommodation at yapc::Europe was discussed - there will be a group
booking at a hotel (with mini golf course!) near the conference, and
some people are driving and camping. The official London.pm flight is
the Gatwick departure on the 1/8 and the return to Gatwick on the 5/8
from Easyjet:
http://www.mail-archive.com/london-pm%40lists.dircon.co.uk/msg06850.html
Greg McCarroll wrote a London.pm CPAN Leaderboard. At the time of
writing London.pm had contributed 2.98% of CPAN. Make sure all your
modules are in the module list...
http://217.34.97.146/~gem/perl/lpm_cpan_lb.cgi
Dave Hodgkinson asked about content management systems. Slashdot.
Greg McCarroll asked a cute maths question about how to distribute N
points around the origin evenly in 3D (on the surface of a sphere). A
good URL was posted. Scary maths terms were bandied about:
http://www.math.niu.edu/~rusin/known-math/index/spheres.html
http://www.math.niu.edu/~rusin/known-math/97/spherefaq
Greg McCarroll opened a huge can of worms by asking for objective
input on the strengths of the various Perl templating solutions, such
as Template Toolkit, Mason, Text::Template, HTML::Template, Embperl,
Apache::ASP etc. Some people pointed out that things like TT were good
as they helped seperation of concerns (such as logic and
presention). Some people pointed out that mini languages are horrible,
although toy presentation languages are probably ok. Many people
confessed to writing their own toy templating system. Someone
referenced Andy's take on all this. XSLT wasn't considered all that
bad after all (see Cocoon 2 for more):
http://torrington.cuckoo.org/template_systems.shtml
http://www.template-toolkit.org/pipermail/templates/2001-June/001076.html
http://london.pm.org/~mark/ttxpath/
http://xml.apache.org/cocoon2/index.html
Greg Cope asked about building a high-performance mailer in Perl for
bulk mailing. We insulted sendmail, qmail, exim, etc. Queueing
stragies might speed things up. RAM disks might help. Bulkmail.pm
might help. No real conclusion.
Matthew Byng-Maddick told us he hated MySQL and badly-written Perl,
but didn't show us any code to laugh at:
http://www.popbitch.com/flat/bored.html
Choice quote of the week was by Lucy McWilliam:
> Beer foamy
Only when you add bubble bath
Choice flame of the week was by Jonathan Peterson:
<flame type='truthful'>
Hmm let's see..
Can I access functions of my mail client using heirarchical
dropdowns without a mouse? Yes.
Can I jump straight to commands and windows without a mouse using
key combinations? Yes.
Can I configure the functionality and default UI behaviour via a
text configuration file? Yes.
Gosh, it's starting too look like well designed GUI's can retain all
of the functionality of key/command based UI's! WELL WHO'D HAVE
FUCKING THOUGHT IT EH? WE ALL THOUGHT THOSE WINDOZE LUSERS COULDN'T
FUCKING BREATHE WITHOUT A MOUSE BECAUSE WE ARE ALL UNIX GEEKS WHO
DON'T WANT TO HANDLE ANYTHING LIKE PROGRESS OR ADVANCEMENT IN
COMPUTER TECHNOLOGY UNLESS ITS CHAMPIONED BY US.
</flame>
Antics of the London.pm IRC channel, #london.pm are available at:
http://astray.com/scribot/2001-06-18.html
In other news: more cookwook madness, Tie::Hash::Transactional, mini
golf flash, greg sending lots of test messages to get higher up in the
posting league, more ny pictures, GraphViz::GraphMyAunt, a london.pm
world map, find your nearest perl monger group, government websites
being crap, reply-to munging argument again, use.perl.org journals to
mail, "I like poo", and Getopt::Attribute:
http://www.electrotank.com/lab/minigolf.html
http://www.dave.org.uk/ny/
http://www.astray.com/Bath.pm/near.cgi
http://www.unixbeard.net/~richardc/lab/journal_to_mail/j2m
This was brought to you with: a wireless laptop, a pavlova, Stella
Artois, and wasabi potato chips, Leon
--
Leon Brocard.............................http://www.astray.com/
Iterative Software...........http://www.iterative-software.com/
... From my brain, an organ with a mind of it's own
